Introduction

Mageia is a Free Software operating system of the GNU/Linux family, which can be installed on computers either as the main operating system, or as an alternative system to one or several pre-installed systems (dual boot). It is a community project supported by the non-profit Mageia.Org organization of elected contributors. Mageia is developed by and for its community of users, and is suitable for all kinds of users, from first-time GNU/Linux users to advanced developers or system administrators.

The latest stable release of the Mageia project, Mageia 7 was developed for over one year before. It will be supported with security and bug fix updates for 18 months, up to XX XXXXXry 2020.

Available installation media

Mageia has two distinct installation media types:

Classical ISOs (DVD 32-bit, DVD 64-bit), which use the DrakX traditional installer. The 32-bit and 64-bit DVD ISOs contain all supported locales, a great variety of packages to choose from (including most supported desktop environments) and all non-free drivers. The use of non-free packages can be disabled during the installation.

Live ISOs, which can be used to preview the distribution, are an installation alternative to place Mageia on your hard drive. Live media come with either the Plasma (64-bit), GNOME (64-bit) or Xfce (32 or 64-bit) desktop environments. The Live DVDs contain all supported locales and a preselection of software, making one of them a faster way to get started working with Mageia. Note that we added a persistence feature which allows to use a partition added on a USB stick to store customization to the system which survive after a reboot.

All ISO images can be burned to a DVD or dumped on a USB flash drive. Please note the file and device size limits as, for example, a 4 GB ISO image can be too big for some "nominally" 4 GB USB drives, due to their actual capacity being slightly lower than the marketed one.

You will find the different download options on the Mageia 7 download page: direct (FTP and HTTP) and BitTorrent downloads are available.

The Mageia online repositories

The software packages that are included in Mageia sit in three different repositories/media, depending on the type of license applied to each package. Here's an overview of those repositories:

Core: The Core repository includes packages with free-and-open-source software, i.e., packages licensed under a free-and-open-source license. The set of the "Core" media along with "Core Release" and "Core Updates" are enabled by default.

Nonfree: The Nonfree repository includes packages that are free-of-charge and free to redistribute, but that contain closed-source software (hence the name - Nonfree). For example, this repository includes NVIDIA and AMD/ATI proprietary graphics card drivers, firmware for various WiFi cards, etc.

The Nonfree media set is enabled by default but can be disabled, if necessary, during the installation.

Tainted: The Tainted repository includes packages released under a free license. The main criterion for placing packages in this repository is that they may infringe on patents and copyright laws in some countries, e.g., multimedia codecs needed to play various audio/video files; packages needed to play a commercial video DVD, etc.

The Tainted media set is added by default but not enabled by default, i.e., it's completely opt-in; so, check your local laws before using packages from this repository.

Please also note that on a 64-bit system, the 32-bit repositories are also added. If the Nonfree or Tainted 64-bit repositories are enabled, the corresponding 32-bit repositories should also be enabled (both in Release and Updates flavors), as they are needed by some packages, such as PlayOnLinux or Steam.

Release highlights

ARM support

The ARM (Advanced RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) Machine) port rebooted during Mageia 6 days has been enhanced.
The core is available for ARMv7 and aarch64.
Support for ARMv5 has been dropped.

There is no traditional installer for now, and it is still considered experimental, but most of the distribution was built successfully on both architectures (see our ARM status overview for details). The plan is to provide installation images for popular ARM devices in the coming months. There is no ETA for those as of Mageia 7's release.

Major developments

Installation

Stage 1

Hardware support was extended to be able to start the installer on very recent computers

NFS support is done using system tools rather than our 15 years old forked NFS code, thus gaining support for NFSv4 & co...

Can install from a hard disk formatted in any supported fs rather than just btrfs, ext[2-4], ISO9660, JFS, ntfs, reiserfs, vfat & XFS

Added support for automatic installation off hard disk, either from ISO or from a distrib tree. Eg:

automatic=method:disk,disk:vdb,partition:vdb1,dir:/Mageia/Mga6.iso

Stage 2

Lots of bug fixes and improvements in the partitioner

Hardware support

New architectures:

ARM v5 support has been dropped

ARM v7 support has been enhanced.

Aarch64 support is added.

Localisation (l10n) / Internationalisation (i18n)

Manuals

The manuals for the traditional installer and for the Mageia Control Center have been (partially) translated into many more languages. See our official documentation

An English screenshot is used when a localized screenshot is unavailable for an HTML manual.

PDF and EPUB manuals are created only when more than half of the needed localized screenshots for those manuals are available.

Software translations

New translations have been added, while others were improved.
Thank you to our dedicated community of translators for your reliable work.

Package management

New RPM

RPM has been upgraded to version 4.14.2.1.

RPM 4.14 offers key improvements to RPM as a whole, including:

Major revamp of debuginfo packages

Major rewrite of package/header reading and signature checking to utilize a single codepath

New SHA256 digests in packages: one for compressed payload alone and one for the header

Weak dependencies are taken into account when ordering

Support for a configurable mode to conserve SSD disks

Support for zstd compression

More information on changes from RPM 4.12 (which shipped with Mageia 5) to RPM 4.13.0.1 is available from the RPM website:

DNF: the alternative package manager

DNF (Dandified Yum) was introduced as an alternative to urpmi since Mageia 6.

DNF is a next-generation dependency resolver and high-level package management tool that traces its ancestry to two projects: Fedora's Yum (Yellowdog Updater, Modified) and openSUSE's SAT Solver (libsolv). DNF was forked from Yum several years ago in order to rewrite it to use the SAT Solver library from openSUSE and to massively restructure the codebase so that a sane API would be available for both extending DNF (via plugins and hooks) and building applications on top of it (such as graphical frontends and system lifecycle automation frameworks).

DNF comes with enhanced problem reporting, advanced tracking of weak dependencies, support for rich dependencies (see the RPM release notes for more on this), and more detailed transaction information while performing actions.

Mageia 7 ships with DNF v4.0.4.

With fresh installations via the classical and live media, DNF will be installed in parallel with urpmi. Depending on the method used to upgrade to Mageia 7, it may be necessary to install the dnf package to have it available.

For information on how to use DNF, please refer to the wiki page: Using DNF.

perl-URPM and urpmi

Doc has been enhanced

urpmi/perl-URPM support a wider range of rpm versions, from rpm-4.11 to latest 4.14

Various bug fixes have been made.

Tools

Mageia Control Center

Other

MageiaWelcome

The Welcome screen is an application that is presented to users when booting into a fresh installation of Mageia. It has now been entirely reworked to have a linear approach, with successive steps following in a logical order of important things to know and do post-installation. By default, it will run at each subsequent boot, but this behaviour is optional. Even if the auto-run option is disabled - it can be invoked at any time as an application (mageiawelcome).

Under the hood, it uses Python and QML. It is now resizeable and use the fonts of the desktop.

Isodumper

Isodumper, a tool to write ISO images on memory devices, comes with an improved function of checking after the writing operation. It looks for sha512 sum file and the signature of this sum. If the sum is found, the application compares the computed sum to the strored one. It indicates also if the sum is signed.
We added also a feature in relation to Live images. By ticking a checkbox, we can add a partition in the remaining space of the support which add persistence. See Live section for more explanation about this feature.

Docker

The Docker ecosystem has been augmented (based on the 18.06 version of the engine) with many additional tools such as docker-compose (orchestration with v3 support), containerd (daemon controlling runC), docker-registry (share of images), docker-machine (install docker on a remote system), and python-docker (python 2 and 3 libraries for engine API management).

LiveCD Tools

With Mageia 7, the LiveCD Tools have been rebased to the latest version (v26.0).

draklive2

The tool used to build the distribution Live ISOs has been revised to make it easier to use. Several examples are provided to help users build their own customised variants of the Live ISOs. There is now a GUI mode, based on the Mageia classical installer, to support package and locale selection.

Base system

Kernel and hardware support

All hardware managed by this kernel version is enabled. The kernel provides better graphics with Mesa 18.3.

Other kernel flavors are included, particularly, kernel-tmb and kernel-linus (a vanilla stock kernel without any extra patchset). See the wiki page Kernel_flavours for more information.

X Window System (X11)

Mageia 7 ships with X.Org 1.20.3.

AMD video drivers

Mageia 7 uses the free video drivers for AMD/ATI graphics cards, AMDGPU for newer cards and Radeon for older graphics cards. The free drivers also use the current Mesa 18.3, provided with Mageia 7. Compared with Mageia 6, hardware support has been increased and performance has been improved.

The proprietary AMDGPU-PRO driver currently only works with X.org 1.1xx, so it cannot be used in Mageia 7.

In case of a hybrid card, the solution exposed with the nouveau driver and the precommand DRI_PRIME=n is also working, at least with the radeon driver.

NVIDIA drivers

The current libre Nouveau drivers are provided. Their performance was greatly improved during Mageia's release cycle, and they might satisfy most owners of Nvidia hardware for casual usage.

The packages for the latest NVIDIA (long-lived branch, release 410.73 at the time of writing) proprietary drivers are provided in the nonfree media repositories. CUDA 9.1.85 is also included in the same nonfree repositories and can be used out of the box after proprietary drivers are correctly configured.

For older graphics cards, the proprietary NVIDIA drivers of the 340 and 390 branches are also still provided (390 being supported on x86_64 only).

Optimus laptops

Owners of NVIDIA Optimus laptops (integrated Intel graphics processor and discrete NVIDIA GPU) now have three ways to benefit from the power of their discrete GPU:

The free Nouveau drivers support Prime GPU offloading out of the box, which can be used via the DRI_PRIME=1 environment variable (unless the proprietary NVIDIA driver is in use by, e.g., mageia-prime). Refer to the Nouveau documentation to see how to configure Xorg to use NVIDIA Prime with DRI3.

As in Mageia 6, the Bumblebee package can be used to bridge the monitor to the NVIDIA GPU, allowing to access its processing power albeit with some overhead.

A new experimental tool named mageia-prime can be used to configure the NVIDIA Prime supported by recent Linux kernels and Xorg servers. It allows to fully switch to using the NVIDIA GPU without the overhead of Bumblebee, and is particularly suited for use with CUDA.

In all three cases, when configuring the graphics drivers, one must only configure the Intel card (at least in most Optimus configurations), as it is typically the only one physically connected to a monitor.

Bootloaders

Desktop environments

All the desktop environments mentioned below are included in Mageia's online repositories, and can be installed in parallel on any Mageia 7 system. Some of them are also included on the physical media, LiveDVDs and Classical DVDs, as specified in each section.

Plasma

Plasma, the new desktop environment of the KDE community, is provided in version 5.14 LTS.

If you want to try Plasma under Wayland, just install plasma-workspace-wayland, and it should appear in your favorite display manager's list of desktop environments.

The default display manager (DM) for the Plasma environment is SDDM, and replaces the now obsolete KDM.

Plasma has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

GNOME

GNOME 3.30 is provided. It now defaults to running on Wayland, but also provides an alternative "GNOME on Xorg" session.

For those preferring the GNOME 2 look and feel, GNOME 3 also provides a "Gnome Classic" session.

GNOME has a specific 64-bit LiveDVD and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

LXDE

The very lightweight GTK+2-based desktop environment is still available and continues to receive improvements from upstream and our Mageia maintainer, even though its community has partly refocused on LXQt.

LXDE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

Xfce

Xfce 4.13 is provided. It uses GTK+3 instead of GTK+2 as with Xfce 4.12. If version 4.14 becomes available in the lifecycle of Mageia 7, it will be updated to 4.14.

Xfce has dedicated 32-bit and 64-bit LiveDVDs and it can also be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

LXQt

LXQt 0.13.0 is provided.

LXQt cannot be installed out of the box from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer) due to space constraints on the ISOs.
Online media need to be added to enable more options during the initial installation - this is explained in the installer documentation.

MATE

MATE 1.20.0 is provided.

MATE can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer). Due to DVD space considerations, some applications such as mate-screenshot (screenshot application) are not included in Classical DVD ISO. For a full MATE Desktop experience, users are suggested to install task-mate package after initial installation.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon 4.0 is provided.

Cinnamon can be installed from the Classical DVD ISO (traditional installer).

Enlightenment

The Enlightenment task package comes with E22.4 and Enlightenment Foundation Libraries (EFL), which includes the previously separate Elementary, Evas-generic-loaders and Evas-generic-players packages. Also included are the connman connection manager for use with the E's Econnman UI, E's Polkit-EFL authentication agent, and three EFL-based applications: the Terminology advanced terminal emulator, the nimble Ephoto image viewer, and the light-weight Rage video player. As with the prior release, Mageia 7 also offers a Mageia-branded theme as the default.

As always, E does not automatically include the startup applications from /etc/xdg/autostart. After installation, go to Main menu > Settings > Startup Applications and add needed system processes (e.g., a policy kit authentication agent) and desired applications to be started on boot up. If your installation includes the ICE windows manager, you may choose between the MATE authentication agent that comes with it and Polkit-EFL.

Beginning with E20, Enlightenment's system tray converted from Xembed notifications with SNI appindicator notifications, which is not yet supported by all applications (e.g., Parcellite clipboard manager), while others use plugins (e.g, Pidgin, which has an Ubuntu indicator plugin in the Mageia package to enable systray notifications).

As of the Beta 1 release there are a few known issues. First, the mgaapplet update indicator and the netapplet indicator have not been modified to enable them in Enlightenment. The /bin/mgaapplet and /bin/netapplet files can be edited by hand with root privileges as shown in Mageia Bug 23954 to enable them. Second, Mageia enables systemd-networkd to manage networking by default. Those who prefer to use connman with the Econnman interface will find it is not always functional (after disabling systemd-networkd and enabling connman), probably as a result of the default wpa_supplicant configuration. (There is a separate, recently-developed wireless gadget for managing multiple backends that is not yet included in the Mageia repositories.) Third, the E17 themes still in the repository do not work with E22. Updated Mageia-branded themes may be packaged in the near future. Additional themes may also be found at https://www.enlightenment-themes.org/.

Light window managers

You can also keep your Mageia 7 installation very light and we provide for this a plethora of small and efficient window managers. You can find afterstep, awesome, dwm, fluxbox, fvwm2, fvwm-crystal, i3, icewm, jwm, matchbox, openbox, pekwm, sugar, swm, and windowmaker. After installation, they appear in the login menu of your display manager.

IceWM

You will find now both "icewm" and "icewm-session" in the login menu of your display manager.

Beginning with IceWM 1.2.13, there is a new binary named "icewm-session". This binary helps you to handle all IceWM subparts (icewmbg, icewm, icewmtray, startup, and shutdown, started in this order). Therefore, you should use icewm-session to start a complete IceWM session. Choosing "Icewm" will only start the window manager itself.

Office apps

Multimedia apps

Since the last patent expired in April, 2017, mp3 encoding is now available in the core media. Tainted medias are still needed for H.264, H.265/HEVC and AAC encoding.

Editors

Vim has been updated to 8.1

NeoVim 0.3.1 is also included

Games

In the Mageia community, our love for free software extends to open source games. A huge effort has been made during the Mageia 7 release cycle to package many new games, making Mageia 7 a very good platform for intensive and casual gamers alike. You can check Mageia App DB to see a list of all the new and updated games in Mageia 7. The following section will only give some cherry-picked examples for each game category.

Education

Mageia 7 comes with both old and new versions of gcompris. The old is based on the GTK+ toolkit and has more activities. The new uses Qt and brings some new activities. We were [1] among the donors in February, 2015, to improve the graphical interface of this very important project.

Software Development

Compilers and tools

GCC has been updated to 8.2.1, GDB to 8.2 and Valgrind to 3.14.0.
LLVM has been updated to 7.0.0.

libvirt 4.8 and virt-manager 2.0

Firebird has been updated to 3.0.3

IPython has been updated to 6.3.

Most libraries were updated to recent stable versions (long-term support when available), such as Qt 5.11.2 and GTK+ 3.22.30.
Tcl/Tk is at version 8.6.8.

Language stacks

Python 3 has been updated to 3.6.6, Python 2 to 2.7.15, and when possible, all Python modules are provided for Python 2 and Python 3.

Perl has been updated to 5.28.0.
Perl modules are now installed either in /usr/share/per5 (pure perl modules) or /usr/lib(64)/perl5 (binary modules), like Fedora does. Perl version is no more included in the standard path.

Some important effort has been made to simplify the Java stack which was hard to maintain in Mageia 6.

Ruby has been updated to 2.5.3.

Rust is at version 1.30.0. It will be updated during Mageia 7's support life to follow new developments.

PHP has been updated from 5.6 to 7.3, which gives a performance improvement of about 50%.

Miscellaneous

Upgrading from Mageia 6

Upgrading from Mageia 6 is supported, and has been fine-tuned over the past few months, so it should work. But, as always, it is very advisable to back up any important data before upgrading and make sure you have made all updates of Mageia 6 (such as rpm and urpmi). Upgrading directly from Mageia 5 or another distribution is not supported.

If you want to upgrade a 64-bit system, it may contain 32-bit software. This is not a problem provided it does not include development libraries. You can identify these by the word "devel" in the name. To know if your system houses such libraries you can use the command:

If 3rd party repositories, such as Google, have been added during the use of Mageia 6, be sure to make a backup/copy of /etc/urpmi/urpmi.cfg.

There are several ways to upgrade from Mageia 6:

Warning: Upgrading an existing install using any of the Live images is NOT supported due to the Live image being copied "as is" to the target system.

If you want to upgrade a previous Mageia installation which was NOT in UEFI, towards an UEFI-mode Mageia 7, you have to do a complete installation. Direct upgrade is not supported.

Upgrading via the Internet

The Mageia Update notification applet, Mageia Online, will notify you that a new Mageia release is available, and ask if you wish to upgrade. If you agree, the upgrade will be carried out from within your Mageia installation without any further steps being necessary.

If you have disabled the applet or it is not automatically running for some reason, you can upgrade manually either using the GUI (mgaonline) or the CLI (urpmi). Both methods are outlined below.

Fully update your system and check you have enough free space (at least 2 GB, depending on your configuration) before starting the upgrade.

Please note!
Use a wired internet connection if possible, especially when you're using nonfree wlan drivers

Upgrading online, using mgaonline (GUI)

If Mageia Online does not display a blue icon in the system tray offering you the option to upgrade to the new Mageia release:

It's best to run the above command twice because in the first run some packages may be downloaded but not installed.

Please note!

It is sometimes a good idea to test the upgrade before carrying it on.
With this command: urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all --test all the packages are downloaded and the upgrade simulated only.

If the result is good, then upgrade for real with the command urpmi --replacefiles --auto-update --auto --download-all

Using the traditional Mageia 7 DVD to Upgrade

You can use the traditional (so, non-Live) Mageia 7 DVD to do clean installs, but also to upgrade from Mageia 6.

It is recommended that the online repositories be set up during the upgrade as the DVD only includes a subset of the complete set of Mageia online repositories.
This is especially important if you use important 32-bit packages in an otherwise 64-bit install, because the 64-bit ISO will only contain the 64-bit packages, so the upgrade is likely to fail if you do not add online repositories.

Moreover, it is possible that a particular Mageia 5 installation may have received an update to a later version of software than that available on the ISO. When this happens, an upgrade may fail to complete. At the time the ISOs are tested, it is impossible to anticipate which Mageia 5 packages may be updated in the future, so offline upgrades (i.e., upgrades attempted without setting up the online repositories) are not supported.

On the first reboot, use the command 'urpmi --auto-update' to make sure all packages were updated.

Known issues

Obsoleted packages

get-skype is now obsolete, as the classic Skype versions for Linux ceased to be supported by Skype on 1 July 2017.
There is a new web-based Skype version which may be installed directly from the Skype web site by selecting the rpm version
here. Note that only 64-bit systems are supported.

Device names changed for MMC devices

By default Mageia uses UUIDs for block-devices. It is possible that you deviated from the default and manually changed /etc/fstab to use device names for MMC block-devices. If so, you will have to change this from /dev/mmcblk0 to /dev/mmcblk1. This has changed in Linux kernel 4.14.